


for you i’ll stay in my castle

by anatoxin



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, making do with what you've got
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 09:44:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21492289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anatoxin/pseuds/anatoxin
Summary: The flight of immigrants — let alone the flight from Russia to the West — is not kind. When the universe comes knocking early for Jupiter Jones, they find a young girl who has nothing left to tie her to Earth. Twenty years later, she adopts a feral lycantant that most would put down without a second thought.
Relationships: Jupiter Jones & Caine Wise
Comments: 7
Kudos: 92





	for you i’ll stay in my castle

The first thing they’d done when she arrived had been to take her name.

They hadn’t phrased it like that, of course. They‘d said it was because she has two names now, like a nickname; because the name didn’t translate well, and so she must have a name in the new language; the name was her childhood name, and now that she was Growing Up she should have a Grown Up Name.

They call her Nea-Seraphi now, and the girl who had been named Jupiter said _goodbye_ and _I’m sorry_ to the memory of a kindly old woman who loved mathematics and the photograph of a man who loved the stars.

* * *

A few years into being Nea-Seraphi, Kalique takes her to go choose a pet.

She’d had a dog once back on earth, in the loosest sense of the word. It had been a stray, and she’d known what it was to be hungry and lonely and cold with no one to support you. She doesn’t know what happened to the dog after Balem and Kalique and Titus came and took her to live in the stars. In its memory, at the splicer’s she chooses the closest thing that she can get to a dog. To _that_ dog.

“Are you sure you want that one?” Kalique asks her, a fan over her mouth covering the twist of her lips. “He’s not been properly coded, darling; he’s not the correct coloring, and as the runt of the litter he won’t be a good match for you.”

She knows how she’s expected to respond and so she swallows down the bitter words that linger on the tip of her tongue and says, “I like his unique coloring, and the fact that he’s the runt means he’ll love me more easily.”

The splicer sells him to the Legion, first. Only the best for the matriarch of the Abrasax, Titus says with a smile, as if she can’t tell when they’re maneuvering to take something that she wants out of her reach. They say it’s less of a hassle than getting him bodyguard training for a royal.

But two can play at this game, and Nea-Seraphi smiles and tells them that it would be like a fairy tale come true to have a decorated Skyjacker as her personal guard.

* * *

“This... incident,” she says, “happened on my ship. It happened to Balem Abrasax, my First Primary. As such I have the right to first blood, don’t you think?”

The Captain of the Legion squadron lent to her clenches his jaw. She takes pity on him. “I’ll buy his contract. It would be less of an embarrassment for your Court Justices that way, no?”

The Legion wouldn’t have to court martial one of their best weapons, announcing to the universe at large that their tools had minds of their own and their training had not been stringent enough to keep the Entitled safe, and she would add a Legionnaire complete with wings to her retinue. It is a good deal for both sides, and the Captain has to know that. The month he’d spent with his squadron assigned to her flagship had given him that much.

He still tries to take responsibility, claiming that it was under his orders that Caine Wise attacked Balem Abrasax, too afraid of what will happen to his lieutenant when the Abrasax matriarch has him in her grasp.

When she tells this to the man himself, Caine Wise makes the first noise since he’d been dragged before her, and it sounds like she has taken a knife and gutted him brutally while wearing the face of someone he’d loved. He babbles, or at least tries to; the muzzle makes words impossible. He whines in the back of his throat, and the head of her household guard grimaces in distaste.

Such loyalty, she marvels privately. The sheaves had said he’d been a lone agent, a floater tossed around between the squads as missions dictated, until his first permanent posting as the hunter-tracker of Captain Stinger Apini’s squad. He has been there for the past five years.

It cements her choice. She has, as she has always had, a soft spot for dogs and their loyalty.

* * *

This is an insult. It is not an attempted murder, and Nea-Seraphi carefully phrases it that way because one means a court martial where they will strip the beautiful hound of his beautiful wings, and the other — well. The Legion belongs to the Commonwealth, and they are familiar with the necessity of wringing every credit they can out of their possessions.

And Nea-Seraphi is the matriarch of the Abrasax. She is well familiar with the practice of leveraging credits to get problems swept under the rug. No doubt the Legion finds this poetic and appropriate, the dog that bit the hand that fed being at the mercy of that very hand.

Winning the heart of this hound, Nea-Seraphi thinks, is simple.

The trainers and splicers say that she should establish dominance early — put a collar on him and shock him if he disobeys. Instead she puts him on a cushion on the floor beside her at meals and hand feeds him sweetmeats. She ensures that his comfort is a priority to her household staff. She praises him, freely and often, and for his soldierly adherence to her rules she allows him to sleep at the end of her bed.

He is tense and anxious all throughout those first few months. She does not make him promises that he will not be hurt, but she does not keep secrets from him. When he asks why she bought his contract after he attacked her First Primary, she tells him the truth.

He cries when she tells him.

* * *

_Are you sure?_ Kalique asks again, and staring down at the huddled form bound, muzzled, and sedated, Nea-Seraphi tells her what she wants to hear.

She does not keep the purchase a secret from her own primaries. None of them understand, but they indulge her like they would indulge a child. She lets them.

* * *

In all their attempts of taming the lycantant, it’s evident that no one has ever tried kindness before.

She tells him _good boy_ and he flinches, then leans in; wanting the praise and yet never expecting it. She makes sure to keep the casual touches proprietary and non-threatening. Eventually he starts expecting it, stops flinching, melts into it. It makes her wonder how the splicers and the Legion had trained him. Perhaps it had been all negative reinforcement and none of the positive.

When she looks down at him, kneeling on a cushion and with his head in her lap, her fingers stroking through his hair and teasing loose the snarls they so often tangle up in, something bubbles up in her chest. It takes her a moment to place the emotion, so long has it been since she’d felt it last (_twenty years ago_, the old woman whispers, the face she keeps close to her heart) — it is contentment.

This is what she wants that Kalique and Balem and Titus do not understand: companionship, pure and simple. But then again, they surround themselves with bootlickers and simpering attendants, so perhaps it is a fundamental difference more than a philosophical one.

“My Lady,” her chamber presence whispers, “You have visitors.”

Caine makes a sound in the back of his throat, but he settles when she rubs the pads of her fingers on the back of his neck and leans back so that she can stand up. She pauses there, for a moment — clad in boots and shirt and trousers that wouldn’t be out of place on an off-duty Legionnaire, raising his head to meet her gaze without fear before he drops the eye-contact and tilts his head to the side to yield his throat, he looks leagues better than the sorry sight that had first been dragged in chains before her.

“What are you waiting for?” she asks him, and in response he rises and falls in at her heel.

* * *

She likes the bee-splice Skyjacker Captain Stinger Apini. She likes bees in general, really. They can be very focused on their tasks, and they’re often pilots and so her only interaction with them is a salute and a nod of acknowledgement whenever they fly her flagship places, but on the whole they are kind to her.

Apini is kind; she can tell that much. Her Majordomo tells her that he keeps his ears to the ground for Abrasax news, as so many do, but more specifically he keeps his ears to the ground for _her_. For the hound with wings she keeps at her feet, at her side, at her back. Even long after his squad had been rotated out as Kalique attempts to exert her influence on what company she keeps for her Skyjacker-run security, he is looking out for his once-Lieutenant.

Nea-Seraphi can appreciate a loyalty that strong. Moreover, _she_ can appreciate a loyalty that is returned, on Caine’s behalf. It is that sentiment, she tells Caine, that drives her to offer Apini and his squad a place in her court as her permanent Skyjacker detachment, far out of the fields of war where Caine cannot help them.

But it is Apini’s gruff kindness and the fact that he sends his daughter to the best school that he can afford on a Skyjacker’s wage that she offers Kiza Apini a place in her personal household after her education is complete.

Hard-working, no-nonsense, an iron fist hidden within the leather glove. He reminds her of an old woman who had passed long ago, and at least in the quiet of her own mind she will acknowledge this. The least that she can do for a man who swears his and his people’s loyalty and honor to her is to ensure that his child is secure. And if Kalique is shocked beyond scolding at the fact that Nea-Seraphi stoops to such lows as caring for her household, that is a bonus.

* * *

The most valued of her retinue all have some token of her regard — her Majordomo always wears a hairpin in Jupiter’s personal deep red and gold; her royal guards, now led by Stinger, all have gold armbands fastened around their bicep that they wear proudly as part of their uniforms — and she knows he knows what it means when she presents him with a fine gold chain studded with deep red rubies. It’s not a coincidence it has the exact length and weight of his old Legion dog tags. Where there would have been the tags proclaiming his name, rank, and ID is a solid gold tag with her personal seal imprinted on it.

It’s a statement — she has tamed the feral lycantant, and he does not need a heavy collar to obey. He bows his head and trembles when he receives it, and she is sure that if he had been an inch less disciplined he would have cried again.

“Your Majesty,” he whispers, and she hushes him, reels him in by the back of the neck so that she can drop the chain over his head.

“You are mine,” she tells him, and lets him fill in the rest of the sentence: personally mine, not beholden to anyone else other than her, not even to the House of Abrasax. Her household guards might defend her person and property, but they are ultimately under the sway of the millennia-old Second Primary that is the shadow ruler of the House. Until Nea-Seraphi can stand on her own outside of the shadow of both her past self and the other Primaries, she will always be playing catch-up.

But her personal court? Her retinue? Her royal guards?

“You have earned the right,” she murmurs, and brushes the hair out of his eyes. “If it is just the household, you may call me what the rest of them do.”

He inhales. “Lady Jupiter,” he says, and hearing the name she keeps close to her chest fall out of his mouth — the mouth of the hound that she’d first loved because he’d reminded her of better times, now _her_ hound — makes something burn in her chest.

It turns out he doesn’t cry that evening, but she does.


End file.
